Hegra

The first thing you notice at Hegra is what is not there. No city skyline, no walls, no row of temples. There are outcrops of rock standing apart from one another on a sand plain, and some of them have had one face flattened into a facade. The doors are shut. Nobody lives inside. These are not houses but tombs.

The best known of them is cut into a rock standing entirely on its own, open on all four sides, unfinished at the top. Its local name means the lonely castle. The facade was completed; the upper part never was.

Petra's Second City

Hegra was built by the Nabataeans: a kingdom that grew up on the caravan routes of northern Arabia and what is now Jordan. Their capital was Petra. Hegra was their major settlement to the south and an important stop on the trade line.

That line carried incense. Frankincense and myrrh grown in southern Arabia moved north by camel caravan to the ports of the Mediterranean. The Nabataeans sat across the middle of that road and organised the passage: they collected water, sank wells, built stopping places, and took a share.

The wealth shows in the tomb facades. The styles are mixed: cavetto cornices out of Egypt, stepped crenellations out of Assyria, column capitals and pediments out of the Greek and Roman world, all on one surface. The Nabataeans took forms from wherever they came and combined them into a facade order of their own.

It Says Whose It Is

What sets Hegra apart from comparable sites is the writing above the tombs. A substantial share of the hundred and eleven monumental tombs carries an inscription cut somewhere visible on the facade.

These inscriptions are not prayers or eulogies. They are records of ownership. They say who commissioned the tomb, which mason worked on it, what year it was finished, and above all who may be buried in it: the person who paid, their children, their grandchildren. Some also set out the fine to be paid by anyone who buries an outsider in it or tries to sell it.

Some of them are, in effect, title deeds. Who, when, by what right — cut into the stone. That is not common in the ancient world at this scale; at most comparable cemeteries we can only infer who was buried where.

Another detail in the inscriptions is worth noting: a number of the people who commissioned tombs were women. Women buying a tomb in their own name and putting their ownership on record.

When Rome Arrived

In AD 106 Rome annexed the Nabataean kingdom and organised the region as the province of Arabia Petraea. Hegra held a Roman garrison; some of the inscriptions found there are in Latin. Then the trade routes shifted, sea transport took over, and the town slowly emptied.

In the centuries that followed, pilgrim and trade caravans passing this way saw the remains but did not settle. The site was largely left alone for a long time — which is, ironically, the main reason it has survived so well.

Today

Hegra was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2008, the first site in Saudi Arabia to be listed. It was largely closed to visitors for many years; guided visits opened from 2020.

The real conservation problem is wind and sand. Sandstone is soft, and on the faces that take the prevailing wind the carving is visibly worn away. Some facades survive almost untouched while another a few metres off has become unreadable — the only difference between them being which way the rock faces.